• NASA
  • IPAC

Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS

The summer visit to Caltech is 4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The IMPULS team came to visit in July 2025. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 6 students.

Quotes

  • I was impressed by how our team (teachers and students alike) were up for the challenge. They had some long days and were exhausted by the time they went home, but they really embraced the project and seem excited to see where it leads.
  • [student:] I really enjoyed getting to know new people and exposing myself to things outside of my comfort zone.
  • [Qualities needed for being an astronomer:] Perseverance; gotta be ok with failure and asking questions but also needing to be ok with working on the problem and beating your head against the wall (metaphorically or not) until the problem is solved or until you can put it down for the day and pick it back up. Also critical thinking and problem solving -- encountering problems is going to be common but finding out “why” or leaving some as “unknown” is pivotal; not everything needs to be finite but solving the questions even with “I don’t know but no one else does so its all speculation” is a much needed quality/skill to have. Leaving it as “meh idk and i'll just move on” doesn’t work for many problems.
  • [Advice to others:] Partnering with your fellow teachers doubled our progress; don’t be shy about pairing up to debug code or interpret puzzling results. And you’ll get exponentially more out of the experience if you keep the conversation going once you’re back home.
  • The work we carried out during the visit can NOT be done online. Having each other right there on hand to talk through and experience the work together was invaluable. It was not enough time, frankly. [We] are much closer and more at ease collaborating than we were before the trip. We feel comfortable calling each other and talking through the results we are getting.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS